Silicon.com: Google and Yahoo! sued for 'illegal gambling ads'

Thirteen big online publishers were hit with a class action lawsuit yesterday, charging them with receiving ill-gotten gains from gambling advertisers - a no-no in California. The suit seems a kitchen sink affair, with seemingly irrelevant publishers, like Jupiter Media thrown in, and sometimes exhibits ignorance of the companies with inaccurate descriptions of their business and even misspellings of their domains (Clicks.com instead of ClickZ.com).

Big automated ad networks, like Google's AdSense, have often been pointed to as easy targets for inappropriate and possibly illegal ads, but the inclusion of many mainstream sites, such as Silicon.com's publisher CNET Networks, is surprising. The lawsuit characterizes them as search engines selling keywords, and it's unclear if the San Francisco lawyers filing the class action understand that some of these sites differ greatly in form and function.